10 goodreading ı NOVEMBER 2006 For the active protagonist of a contemporary thriller, Har ry Bar nett is pushing the envelope a bit. He’s seventy in this, his third outing in print. Harold Mosley Bar nett first appeared in Goddard’s 1990 novel Into the Blue, in the course of which he unravelled the mystery of the disappearance of a young woman last seen in his company, heading for the summit of a mountain on the island of Rhodes. At the beginning of that book he was at the nadir of his life, looking into the mir ror at his red-rimmed, dark- socketed eyes and thinking, ‘This is the worst, Har ry, the least and the lowest.’ It actually got a whole lot worse before he managed to convince not only Heather Mallender’s family but also the local – and inter national – constabulary that he was not, in fact, responsible for her disappearance. By the end of Into the Blue he is in a position to offer salvation to a woman about to be deported from Britain, because, as he says, ‘I just don’t see why everyone has to lose.’ The second book to feature Har ry, Out of the Sun, sees him discovering that he has a son via a brief liaison some years previously – and that that son is now lying in a life-threatening coma. He also meets his American/Canadian future wife, Donna. In Never Go Back, the latest Harry Bar nett instal- ment, set ten years after the second, Harry has been living in Canada for some time and he and Donna have a daughter, Daisy. Harry is temporarily back in Britain to clear up the affairs of his recently-deceased mother when he’s visited by a couple of chaps from his National Service days back in the 1950s and is told about a 50th reunion about to be held in a castle in Scotland. He agrees to attend, duly boards the train to Aberdeen at Paddington Station, and from then on things start going haywire – beginning with the apparent suicide (murder?) of one of the party on the train. To give away any more of Goddard’s convoluted plots risks spoiling things for those yet to read them. I asked him about the complex nature of his books. ‘Well, I have a convoluted imagination,’ he responded with a grin. ‘I can’t really do simple plots. I like to take one story and put it together with another story and possibly a third story. But partly I think that’s because that’s what life is like – it’s not a simple plot. When I was a child my idea of a really enjoyable Saturday was to spend the whole day in the library reading history books, and then altering the histories I was reading – or connecting them in some way. I like connecting things: taking one plot and putting it together with another one, then seeing how that works.’ He grew up in Portsmouth, where his parents worked in the dockyards. Unsurprisingly, given his childhood proclivities, author profile The legion of fans of English crime writer ROBERT GODDARD have a new treat to look forward to with the publication of his latest book, Never Go Back, which stars long-lost hero Harry Barnett. ALISON PRESSLEY spoke to the author during his recent tour of Australia. the plot thickens